finances

How To Use Financial Jujitsu To Fight Tyrants and Build Freedom By Paylie Roberts “Jujitsu expresses the philosophy of yielding to an opponent’s force rather than trying to oppose force with force. Manipulating an opponent’s attack using his force and direction allows jujitsu ka to control the balance of their opponent and hence prevent the opponent from resisting the counterattack.”[i] “In short, resisting a more powerful opponent will result in your defeat, whilst adjusting to and evading your opponent’s attack will cause him to lose his balance, his power will be reduced, and you will defeat him. This can apply whatever the relative values of power, thus making it possible for weaker opponents to beat significantly stronger ones.”[ii] Disclaimer: I am not a tax accountant or tax attorney, and nothing in this article is to be construed as tax, accounting, or legal advice. Seek the guidance of a qualified professional. The reader is responsible for his/her/its own actions. As preppers and liberty activists we tend to be very good at identifying and characterizing problems, because that is a necessary first step. But we too often get stuck focusing on the problems and don’t spend enough time acting on the next step of developing practical solutions. I want to try to spend more of my time (and yours) in my articles focusing on solutions, and I pleadingly recommend and request that other liberty-oriented alternative media writers do the same. That is the only way we are going to win our freedoms back. Mere whining solves nothing. It is important for every liberty minded or preparedness-oriented person to realize that globalist “elitists” are waging a stealth war against the independence, self reliance, and freedom of people around the world. It is much easier for them to control and steal from dependent indentured serfs. And they are all about control – that is their drug of choice. This “war” has several levels, or layers. The first includes propaganda, information warfare and psychological warfare. The second layer is financial warfare. There are also other layers, including a stealth war against our health, and physical warfare (DHS, police state), but the financial aspect is the focus of this article. As large numbers of people are starting to see through the veneer of first layer of the info matrix, the financial layer is playing greater importance. The financial layer has many, many components. These include: heavy complicated taxation, heavy regulation, extensive financial reporting requirements, very strict banking rules toward customers (not toward the banks), such as Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) on cash transactions. This also includes the fact that the banking system is becoming more and more digital and networked, and that digital banking network involves a contrived artificial monopoly controlled by the globalist elite. This network is known as SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). Control of that system is financial control over everyone who uses that banking network. The financial war also includes FACTA (Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act) regulations on foreign accounts, RICO (The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) and Asset Forfeiture laws. It also includes the fact that the FedGov has created incentives that both encourage businesses to make their products overseas (high taxes and regulations making the US noncompetitive as a producer nation) and then ship their products back to the US (pretend “free trade” – actually trade “managed” for the benefit of special interests – see the Trans Pacific Partnership or TPP trade agreement). This previous example leads to the inevitable destruction of the so-called “middle class” in the US. The financial warfare also includes actions by the Federal Reserve, such as ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) which punishes savers and rewards debtors, and the creation of trillions of Federal Reserve Notes (incorrectly called “US Dollars”), which are given out like candy to all the major banks around the world, while the rest of us have to work like slaves to survive. The fact that the Federal Reserve and other central banks like the European Central Bank (ECB) create trillions of fiat “currency units” out of thin air, amounts to what is basically the largest counterfeiting operation in human history. The second biggest counterfeiting operation in human history is the fractional reserve nature of the Western/global banking system (explained more later). These latter two create price inflation making products needed to live much more expensive for all us plebeian little people. I won’t go into detail on any of these numerous topics, as each one could take a lengthy article to cover in any depth. If you have been paying attention, none of this is news to you. If not, I would recommend doing some background self-education. But the more important topic to all this is, what can we do about it? There is one aspect to the financial war that I would like to focus on in this article, because it is one that we can very effectively work around. That aspect is the “war on cash”. If you are not familiar, many government officials, central bank officials, and academics would like to do away with cash and require everything be done by electronic banking only. There are several real reasons they want this and several false narratives they will use to justify it. The dishonest justifications will include “terrorism,” the illegal drug trade, and the “cost” of cash to society. The real reason is always about control, and theft. Cash cannot easily be tracked, controlled, taxed, and confiscated. Electronic bank deposits allow The Powers That Be (TPTB) to do all of the above with ease. Cash allows the true free market (aka the “Black Market”) to exist; it is a method that liberty lovers can employ (for now) to circumvent tyranny. However, the central banks would also like to get rid of cash because they have been perusing a policy of zero interest rates to allegedly “stimulate” the economy, but that is not accomplishing their goals, so they want to create negative interest rates, as has already been done in Europe and Japan. Basically they want to discourage people from saving and keeping money in the bank by creating a disincentive (you lose money in the bank). They want to encourage people to spend money to stimulate a moribund economy. The problem with this policy of course, is paper cash. As long as people can hold cash, they can just withdraw cash from the banks and store it in a personal vault. As long as there is cash, TPTB can not force people to spend it. Therefore, they have to do away with cash. But how can they do this? They could just make it illegal, and/or remove it from circulation. But that would create too much of an outcry and might wake the soon to be boiling frog. So how? The 5 Minute Forecast from Agora Financial has a good hypothesis on how this could happen: “Depending on whom you believe, the total value of all coins and banknotes on the planet is about $5 trillion. Meanwhile, the CIA World Factbook tells us the total value of “broad money” — coins and bank notes, plus money market accounts, savings accounts, checking accounts and time deposits — is more than 16 times larger, $80.9 trillion. That gap between physical currency and “broad money” is key to the diabolical scheme mooted at Jackson Hole [2016 Federal Reserve meeting] that nearly no one is talking about. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University named Marvin Goodfriend gave a talk about a paper he wrote with the dry and wonkish title The Case for Unencumbering Interest Rate Policy at the Zero Bound. Our rewrite would be How We’ll Win the War on Cash Once and for All. “On its face, the Goodfriend speech was about negative interest rates,” Jim tells us. As we’ve been describing for some time now, negative rates are de rigueur in Japan and Europe. You can put money in the bank and get less of it back when you take it out. Everyday people are coping as best they can. Only yesterday, we told you how people in Germany are buying home safes in which to keep their physical currency, the better to ensure it won’t lose value. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, “If citizens can go to cash, that makes it difficult to impose negative rates on digital bank accounts,” says Jim. Here in The 5, we’ve periodically cited a laundry list of academics who would just as soon abolish cash, the better to achieve their aims. But in his talk at Jackson Hole, Professor Goodfriend identified the proverbial fly in the ointment: “The public is likely to resist the abolition of paper currency.” [emphasis added] How to get around that? The professor has come up with a mouthful he calls the “flexible market-determined deposit price of paper currency.” “In plain English,” says Jim, “this means the ‘money’ in your bank account and the ‘money’ in your purse or wallet would be like two different kinds of currency. “There would be an exchange rate between the two, just as there is an exchange rate between dollars and euros… “What this means is if you go to the bank and withdraw $1,000, the bank might only give you $980 in cash because of the ‘exchange rate’ between your bank account and cash. Or if you deposit $1,000 in cash, the bank might only credit your bank account $980 because of the same ‘exchange rate’ between your cash and the bank account balance. In short, it’s a way to impose negative interest rates on physical cash. “It’s true,” Jim allows, “that Goodfriend is an academic, not a policymaker. But Yellen and other Fed bigwigs like William Dudley and Stanley Fischer were sitting in the audience. […] Because it’s so convoluted, and so completely counter to people’s expectations of what’s “normal”… we imagine it could be introduced only under cover of dire financial crisis worse than 2008. We’re talking about a moment when the masses are so panicked about whether 18-wheelers will still deliver food and toilet paper to the stores that they’ll put up with any scheme imposed by their masters if it means they won’t go cold and hungry. That dire moment is not right around the corner… but the stage is being set, […] As we’ve been saying for a while, that’s when leaders of the G-20 nations meet in China. There, China and Russia will likely step up their trade and foreign exchange in a way that bypasses dollars. Saudi Arabia might well find a new pricing benchmark for oil that’s not the dollar. The International Monetary Fund will move forward with its plans to supplant the dollar with the “special drawing right,” or SDR, as the globe’s reserve currency. Those maneuvers won’t necessarily make big headlines. They’ll occur behind the scenes. But they’ll all tee up the big event at the end of September […]. ” [iii] Imagine this: You patiently wait for your $1500 paycheck to be automatically deposited to your bank account (the amount after they have already taken automatic taxes out of your paycheck for federal tax, social security, etc.), but when you go to the bank to withdraw cash, you are charged a 5% conversion to cash fee, and really only have $1425 available for withdrawal, or to pay bills with. And since most places now require direct deposit, you have no choice but to pay this fee, unless you choose not to withdraw cash. With budgets so tight, many people will choose to forgo the paper cash and will leave the currency in the bank, making it easy prey for governments and bankers. Or let’s say you had a yard sale, and went to the bank to deposit your $100 from being out in the sun all day haggling and dealing, the bank charges you a conversion fee to deposit your cash, and now you only have $90 to use for bills or whatever you were going to use it for. The idea is similar to using a credit card merchant or other service provider such as paypal to process your financial transactions, you get charged fees for doing so, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This contrasts with paying cash, and keeping the banks out of it, so you are not charged those fees. If the above proposal is implemented, people will be further dis-incentivized to hold cash, and there will be a gradual move away from cash, as much as TPTB can get away with – without waking up the proverbial frog of the masses. Again, what can we do about it? As the quotes at the beginning of the article imply, we use financial jujutsu. What is financial jujutsu? We turn the actions of TPTB against them. There are many tools in the tool box of the financial jujutsu practitioner. I will cover only a few in this article. Prerequisites: These are the baby steps that needs to be taken before the methods outlined below can be applied. If you are already utilizing these approaches, kudos to you. Basically, stop using bank cards, credit cards, and online banking, etc. Switch to paper currency, as in paper cash and money orders. Conduct all the transactions that you can with cash, and leave the banks out of your life as much as possible. Pay for your groceries at your local farmers market with cash, pay your heater repair man in cash (make sure to get a receipt of course), pay for your fuel needs in cash. This will increase your freedom and particularly privacy. This is actually much harder than it might sound. Many businesses want you to pay your bills electronically, including the power company, internet service provider, etc. But you can still manage to pay bills the old fashioned way, whether it is getting a money order paid for with cash (small fee applies – but you can choose the institution your fee goes to and you can bypass the bank), or stop by your local utilities office, and pay your bill in person, in cash. If you have your own business, you can offer a discount to folks who pay with cash, and claim that you can do so because you don’t have the added merchant fees since you don’t have to accept payment electronically. This will encourage buyers to pay you with cash as both of you will save a few bucks. Once you’ve mastered the old fashioned art of paying for everything with cash, you can now tackle the more advanced methods of financial jujutsu below. Method 1: Network with other relatively local like-minded people and conduct your transactions in precious metals – most likely in silver coinage. If The Powers That Be either outlaw or make impossible the anonymous use of green pieces of (toilet) paper to conduct transactions, how about we circumvent the central banks out of the picture all together and return to using honest, real money? This is using the principle of jujutsu – not confronting the stronger opponent, but using the force of your stronger opponent against him by redirecting it for your own counterattack. The removal of cash from circulation and the disincentive to use or hold it creates an opportunity for everyone who prefers or advocates sound money and conducting transactions privately outside the electronic banking system. There will always be a demand for “cash-like” transactions across many people in society. If TPTB remove the green pieces of paper, that will leave a void in our culture and society, and we can fill that void by re-establishing the use of silver coinage – something that would likely be relatively readily accepted, perhaps more so than other options. There are several likely objections to this. Objection 1: The store will not accept silver coins, only debit/credit cards. This is an easy fix. First try to do business and support businesses that are willing to transact in silver coins. You may not have success trying to use silver coins at the corporate-mega-box-grocery-mart, but talk to the owner (or even manager) of the small local grocery, farmers market, sporting goods store, or ranch supply store and I highly doubt s/he will refuse silver coinage for payment. As this trend spreads, the market will sort it out. Accepting silver coinage for payment will offer a competitive advantage to those businesses who accept it, which will compel others to follow. And for the ones that never do, like the big corporate box stores? Well you didn’t want to support them anyway – right? The only way to stop this would be to make it illegal – and that would risk waking the frog to the true nature of the tyrants. Objection 2: Using silver coinage may work fine for relatively local “cash-like” transactions, but it won’t work for long distance or online transactions. This is true. It is cumbersome to ship silver coins around, and there are concerns about theft and fraud. This problem would have been solved by the private currency system known as the “Liberty Dollar” founded by Bernard von NotHaus,[iv] as it would have had local transaction points all around the country – similar to Western Union except for silver coins instead of paper. But, unfortunately he was imprisoned for, ironically of all things, “counterfeiting”, because he used the word “dollar” in the name of a private money. This only goes to show how corrupt, fraudulent and morally and logically inverted our society and the “government” is where the central bank creates trillions of “currency units” out of thin air and they put the Chairman on the cover of Time Magazine, while someone dealing in real silver and gold is convicted of “counterfeiting”[v]. ABSURD. Anyway, there is an alternative solution to this problem – see Method 2 below. Objection 3: Silver coins are based on weighted value, and would be difficult to split up for something that costs a $1.99. The simple solution to this is to use “junk silver” or very small weight silver coins (they do exist). Objection 4: The volatility of the value of silver would be problematic. The simple solution here is to right your inverted thinking. It is not the value of silver that is volatile, it is the value of the fiat paper currencies that are volatile. To the degree that silver is volatile in terms of purchasing power of real goods, much of that actually has to do with (temporary) attempts at manipulating the price of precious metals by Wall street and central banks. Any of these objections could be worked out through negotiation based on who you are transacting with and the value of the goods that are being exchanged. Creative strategies can be easily developed to overcome such objections, including simply bartering goods and services, not only using precious metals. Method 2: Private market digital currencies. The best known of these of course is Bitcoin, but there are others. (Please note that I make no recommendations of which private market digital currencies to utilize, I am merely speaking of them in the general sense.) These allow private transactions online or at great distance that circumvent the financial control grid of TPTB. The main issue here is again getting enough acceptance of them that they can be used practically for most transactions. However I would emphasize that unlike precious metals, digital currencies are NOT a reliable store of value (therefore not “money”) but they do allow for private transactions as long as the internet and IT infrastructure are functioning in the current manner. Therefore, I would not hold large amounts of bitcoins, since that “wealth” could vaporize if the internet is taken down or computers are disabled. Instead I would still hold the bulk of savings in real tangibles such as: precious metals, food, land, ammo, tools, etc, and only purchase digital currencies as a temporary intermediary for transactions. Similarly, fiat paper currencies are not a reliable store of value either, as they have no intrinsic value, and are therefore not “money”. Historically, the long term survival rate for all fiat currencies drops to zero, and a hundred years of debased purchasing power (97% loss) of the so-called “US Dollar” completely demonstrates this. Therefore, hold only as many paper notes as you need on a short term basis – perhaps one to three months worth of expenses. Perhaps the ideal combination would be a digital currency backed by verified precious metals. I hear there are some people working on this, but not rolled out yet. That would certainly kill all the counterfeit fiat currencies of the world – including the US Dollar, the Euro, and the IMF’s “Special Drawing Rights”. Time will tell. Free market sound (real) money is a key step to disabling the globalist tyrants and to building freedom. Method 3: Start a business. This is a bit of a change of direction from the previous two methods, but still falls under the umbrella of financial jujutsu. What’s that you say? You have a job and you have no ideas for a business? It doesn’t matter. The totally absurd and completely immoral IRS taxtortion system is designed with a myriad of loopholes, and incentives for businesses and special interests, designed more to manipulate behavior (there is TPTB “control freak” thing again) than it is to actually collect revenue. Although it is better to keep as much income you can out of the financial control grid, you may as well take advantage of those loopholes for any income you are unable to keep out of the financial control grid. Make up something you are interested in and create a sole proprietorship. Write off as much as you logically can on your taxes, but do it in a way it is not suspicious. You will get at least 2-3 years of good write offs before the IRS considers it a “hobby” and stops letting you write stuff off. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting to falsify your taxes, what I’m saying is that if you love collecting fishing lures, start a fishing lure sole proprietorship small business, buy your fishing lures wholesale, of course test some to make sure they work well, then sell the rest at retail prices, and write off the cost of your newly found entrepreneurship including cost of supplies, testing, business licenses, website, travel expenses, etc. Any startup business is justified in having losses, and those losses should absolutely be claimed on your taxes. Make sure you are saving all your receipts of course, especially for that back up generator you need to continue running your business during power failures. Method 4: This is a controversial one, but could be appropriate under the right circumstances. I only ask that if you immediately disagree with what you read next, that you please read to the end of the section before you make a final judgment about the suggested method. If you have a lot of debt liabilities, with little assets that could be seized (e.g. house, car, business etc.), file bankruptcy, and start over with a clean slate, on a cash only basis. Similar to tax loopholes for businesses, this is a legally viable tool that has been put in place and is available for use. Some people will argue that this is not right because you are defaulting on creditors. This would be true if we were operating with a honest banking and monetary system with sound money. In the case of an honest banking and monetary system I would agree that bankruptcy would not really be the morally correct thing to do. But we do not live in such a world. The reality is, due to the fiat and fractional reserve nature of the banking system, when new “debt” or “credit” is created, about 95%-97% of that is created out of thin air. It was “currency” that did not exist before. You (actually the lending institution via your credit acceptance) created that “currency” from nothing. Lending institutions are highly leveraged this way, and typically only have to maintain 3%-5% reserve against that loan. So for every $30 to $50 they have in actual deposits, they can lend out $1000, or about $960 they didn’t actually have before – meaning they created it out of nothing. If you feel morally compelled to do so, pay back 5% and you have covered the lenders actual deposit loss. It is through this mechanism, and through the similar mechanism of the sale of US Treasury bonds, that US “Dollars” (Federal Reserve Notes) are created. Therefore, in the current western banking/monetary system, all currency is actually debt. If all the debt were ever paid off, there would be no currency. Thus a so-called “debt jubilee” that various commentators have mentioned is not possible under the current system because then there would be no currency in circulation. A new monetary system would have to be created. If you doubt these points, read the following article and then read this academic study/paper. I realize that this Alice In Wonderland system is difficult to wrap one’s mind around for the unfamiliar, but these are facts, albeit hidden from the public for the obvious reason that it benefits the globalist elitists and bankers, while enslaving the masses. Widespread understanding of the fraudulent nature of this current monetary and banking system threatens their nearly infinite money-power gravy train. The other moral argument against bankruptcy is that it is still a contract default, a breach of a person’s word. The counterargument to that is that the bank(s) misrepresented what they were actually providing; that is, they committed fraud. Therefore the contract is not valid. In the end every individual is going to have to decide for him of herself about the morality or not of filing bankruptcy. But as a practical matter, it is an option that may or may not be a useful tool available to you to increase your personal freedom from the debt slavery of the financial warfare. So on the one hand, your situation might warrant considering bankruptcy. On the other hand, if you have assets that can easily be seized, or student loans that can not be discharged, then bankruptcy probably will not benefit you. Methods 5 through Infinity: Communicate with others on jujutsu methods you found effective against the giant, and encourage others to learn and apply them. There are a nearly infinite number of tactics where one could employ the philosophy of financial jujutsu to “live free in an unfree world”. We are only limited by our own imaginations and moral compasses. What are some tactics you can think of to employ financial jujutsu to win the battle for freedom from corrupt tyrants (and central bankers)? About Paylie Roberts Paylie Roberts is the author of the non-fiction book Memories of Poland, Lessons From Growing Up Under Communism. She is also the author of two novels: Bugging Out To Nowhere, and Life After Bugging Out. She has a Bachelor’s degree in biology, and lives with her husband, two German shepherds, and various livestock, somewhere between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains. [i] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Jujutsu. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujutsu#Heritage_and_philosophy. Accessed September 7, 2016]. [ii] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Judo. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judo#Judo_versus_jujutsu. Accessed September 7, 2016]. [iii] Available at: http://agorafinancial.com/2016/08/31/the-most-evil-move-yet-in-the-war-on-cash/. Accessed September 7, 2016. [iv] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Bernard von NotHaus. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_von_NotHaus. Accessed September 7, 2016]. [v] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Bernard von NotHaus. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_von_NotHaus. Accessed September 7, 2016].